Found four unopened boxes of gourds in the garage a few weeks ago.  Sort of felt like Christmas!!

As a break from constantly working in two dimensions with my painting, I decided to try my hand at creating this little gourd sculpture for my office.

At the best of times, I’m not good at cleanup but I persevered with the outside of the gourd, soaking it in a mild bleach solution and scrubbing off the mold with a stainles steel scrubby I wanted to create a vessel from the gourd so I cut a hole in the top with my small jigsaw, put on a mask and starting scraping out the inside. (I do this part outdoors. Don’t want all that “stuff” flying around in my studio!) Once the inside was smooth, I painted it a flat black.

I painted the gourd with the blue latex we used to paint the office walls. As a bonus, I found this fibrous paper in my “stash”  that contained small gold paper inclusions and embedded leaves. I glued the paper to the gourd using Matte Medium. I tore the paper into small irregular pieces, brushed medium onto the gourd, placed the paper then applied more medium on top. I started by tearing roughly around the leaves then forming the leaves into a kind of necklace around the rim of the gourd. Then I just randomly applied small pieces of paper to cover the surface.

I dyed a bunch of pine needles black using RIT dye (the tips of the needles go black; the rest of the needle doesn’t absorb the color as well) then sewed them to the rim. I attached a few Swarovski crystals, added some fibers from my wife’s supply and a couple of I Ching coins I pick up when I’m in Toronto’s Chinatown and voila, I had a small, completed sculpture for the office.